The Left Hand Of Darkness re-read

[galadhir]

Ugh. Re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness hits differently when you read it 30 years later and realize how easy it would have been not to continually misgender everyone. But Genly Ai is just as much of a dick as I remembered, if not more so.

It suffers (I think) because it's written by a cis person - writing about a cis person encountering a society of entirely imaginary agender people, as a thought experiment.

It seems like the author is not aware that genderless people actually exist (and why should she be at that date?)

So the whole thing is (a) theoretical for her, and (b) written to help cis people contemplate gender. And frankly, the narrator's consistent, sexist, obnoxious reading of gender into everything continues to be (sometimes overtly) insulting and sickening to me.

OTOH, her worldbuilding and language is still just as gorgeous as ever, and I still want to live in the Fastness of the foretellers.

(I'm not dissing it, it was hugely meaningful to me in my youth in the 70s, and is still a one-of-a-kind enby novel. Revolutionary and mind expanding for the time - though even then I found Ai old fashioned and sexist - it's still the only book I know of with a society of people who were more like me than this one we live in.

But I wish she had gone that extra mile and either invented a gender neutral pronoun or realized she could use 'they.' Gender neutral 'he' strikes me badly these days.)

It's nice to have The Murderbot Diaries as a modern compare and contrast for novels where the protagonist/narrator is agender.

That's progress, I guess! Nowadays my genderless comfort read is not a story where a cis person ruminates on how weird these genderless people are. Nowadays it's a story where a genderless person has adventures where their relation to gender is (a) barely mentioned and (b) continually affirmed when it is.

Nice.

Comments

[westerling]

I gave this to my son to read as an introduction to LeGuin, with the caveat that it was written way before anybody was talking about gender stuff publicly, and that it was considered groundbreaking at the time. I haven't read it since college and was wondering about how it held up, so your review was interesting to read. He hasn't reported back yet about what he thinks, but maybe I should re-read it too, so that we can discuss it.

And as previously discussed (but as cannot be said enough) <3 Murderbot. :D

[duskpeterson]

"The King was pregnant." One of the all-time great lines in SFF.

Le Guin did express deep regret in later years that she used male pronouns throughout the text. I prefer her later story set in the same world: "Coming of Age in Karhide."

[mistressofmuses]

I deeply appreciate The Murderbot Diaries for being what it is.

(And seeing ANYONE miss the point so hard that they think that Murderbot should be assigned a gender now that it's "so human" makes me want to flip tables.)

I haven't read The Left Hand of Darkness in a LONG time, and to be honest, there's probably a lot that I didn't really understand well when I did read it. I can very much see ways in which it did not age well in respect to the ways attitudes and language have both progressed.